Month: July 2009

Launchpad is a very unique project, in the sense it tries to integrate different open source software ecosystems, with several useful services for open source users. If I weren’t too busy I would write a little more about that :D. Bravo, Launchpad team!

debuginfo rpm packages are very useful in the sense they provide debugging symbols for the programs you want to analyze. I found a quite bizarre bug on the virtualization rawhide packages, and wanted to get a stack trace to analyze, but didn’t have debuginfo packages readily available, so I learned to generate my own packages. As lazy as I am, this blog is my notebook for small things I know I will need again. So here are the steps:

* Install the package redhat-rpm-config
* Get the source rpm for the package you want to build stuff from
* install the source package
rpm -ivh foo.src.rpm
* Go to root’s rpmbuild directory
* build the spec using

Recently, the free/open source community saw many interesting news, I am going to comment on some of them:

* Microsoft will release the EMCA under the Community Promise license, which means good news to Mono. Mono is an open source EMCA + Microsoft APIs implementation. There’s a lot of friction inside the community generated by Mono, lots of people are strongly against it fearing some misterious lawsuit that MS could move against the creators of open source implementations. I, for one, think it’s a good thing to have more high quality open source development tools, I am very happy that all the alledged fears would be dissipated after this announcement.

* Nokia announced that future versions of Maemo will use Qt instead of GTK. Slightly less controversial, seems like an interesting move for Nokia, and the tablet community in general. Nokia LGPLed the library, that has a strong and very professional team of developers, is widely used for companies to do their products and is cross platform. The other underlying technologies (such as DBUS, telepathy, avahi), result of freedesktop.org efforts, will still be used. We should put ego fights aside and choose whatever makes sense for the greater good of the user community.

I am sure there are lots of things I just forgot to mention. Good enough for a quick blog post 🙂